Originally Posted by Pestle:
Regarding the responsibility of car manufacturers:
Nothing comes into being from a void. There is human thought, intention, and labor involved in all the stuff we use all day long. Ethical production requires the designers to stop and think hard about whether the current method is actually meeting the needs of all the populations who will interact with their product, or whether they're unintentionally handicapping people with bad design. (As the terms are used in the design industry, a disability is innate to people; a handicap is caused by flawed designs in the environment. A missing leg is a disability, but it only becomes a handicap when architects and city planners fail to accommodate that disability.)
Children are a special population, just like the elderly, the deaf, the blind, and those who have mobility impairment. But unlike all those other special populations, it's 100% guaranteed that everyone who's ever born will spend time as a child. And it's a huge failing on the part of the auto industry to design vehicles as though the only occupants worthy of comfort and safety are adults. That places the burden on other industries to come up with car seats and other accessories that can modify the vehicle to accommodate children. Even with those modifications, the fact is that vehicles, as currently designed, handicap children and their parents.
It's a bad design.
So true!